India

During Narendra Modi’s first five years in office, the Indian prime minister made 93 foreign visits, equalling the number of trips his predecessor, Manmohan Singh, made over an entire decade. At an average of more than 18 visits every year, Modi also travelled far more than his counterparts. In

Zakir Naik is an Indian preacher of Islam who currently calls Malaysia home. Described by the Washington Post as a “rock star of tele-evangelism”, he is also a fugitive, having evaded law enforcement in his home country of India since July 2016, when he fled the country within hours of bombers

The political talk in South Asia at this moment is reminiscent of the 1990s. The Taliban are returning to Afghanistan and conflict is escalating between India and Pakistan in a seething Kashmir region. There is even debate on the potential use of nuclear weapons amid India-Pakistan crises ­–

It is impossible to know what is actually happening in Kashmir. Since 4 August, Indian forces have effectively incarcerated the region, with people kept indoors and more than 1600 “social activists” detained. Communications to, and in, the Kashmir Valley have been severed. There have been no

One, a rugged survivalist with a penchant for striding through dangerous terrain, accompanied only by a television crew. The other, the man who holds the hearts, minds, and fates of 1.2 billion people in his clenched fists.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi might not have a clearly articulated

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speech last week from the ramparts of the Red Fort in New Delhi to mark India’s Independence Day carefully delineated his new strategic and foreign policy in the region. We can call this “nudge diplomacy”, and it stands in stark contrast to the more assertive

The mixed reaction to the Indian government’s planned dissolution of the state of Jammu and Kashmir into two union territories, which has been approved and will take place on 31 October this year, demonstrates yet again the geopolitical complexity of the western Himalaya. It is also an example of

Over the past few months, sugar has featured prominently in India’s political and economic discussion. Countries such as Australia, Brazil and Guatemala are upset with the Indian government’s subsidies to its sugarcane farmers, alleging in a claim to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) that the

Could India be heading towards a dystopian future, with severe environmental decay and massive unemployment leading to social collapse?
There are rumblings of such a bleak outlook. A major global anti-poverty NGO said it at Davos in January, while in recent weeks, social media has been alight with

The agonising and often exhausting wait for the monsoon has long inspired India’s writers and poets. But it’s the country’s farmers who know all too well the impact a delayed or indeed a failed monsoon can have on millions of lives.
The monsoon is India’s life-giver, its rebirth and its

Just 40 kilometres southeast of Chennai in the south of India lies Sriperumbudur, a part of the Kanchipuram district of Tamil Nadu. While Kanchipuram is a town, famous for its silk saris and Hindu temples, the village of Sriperumbudur has mostly been famous for the assassination of the country’s

The re-election of India’s Narendra Modi and Indonesia’s Joko “Jokowi” Widodo saw India-Indonesia relations take another step forward after both leaders congratulated each other on social media. The results put both leaders in a strong position to advance a comprehensive strategic

Press freedom is under the scanner in Australia, as it is around the world. For the first time in decades, Australian journalists have found themselves the subject of police raids over reporting on national security issues, with the prospect they could be jailed over the stories that date back more

Four times Masood Azhar escaped the formal designation as an international arch-terrorist. Each time India had sought to add his name to a UN Security Council blacklist as the head of Pakistan-based militant group Jaish-e-Mohammed, China had cast a veto.
But in a sudden turn-around this month that

Book Review: Unruly Waters: How Mountains, Rivers and Monsoons Have Shaped South Asia’s History, by Sunil Amrith (Penguin, 2018)
As Sunil Amrith explains in this new book, South Asia is not the only Asian region with a water problem. The whole continent has issues. Asia is

India’s National Congress Party is facing an existential crisis, now suffering unprecedented consecutive electoral defeats. Once invincible and a political behemoth having ruled post-independent India for close to five decades, Congress failed to stop Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya

The Bhartiya Janata Party’s (BJP) Narendra Modi has secured his second term as India’s Prime Minister with a landslide victory in the 2019 general elections. He spearheaded the long drawn out election campaign by labelling himself as India’s watchman, while the opposition criticised him for

This past Sunday was the final phase of voting in India’s seven week election period, with the votes cast and stored on electronic voting machines to be collated on Thursday. While media focus has been on a presidential-style campaign between incumbent Prime Minister Narendra Modi of the Bharatiya

Two of the world’s democracies on either side of the Indian Ocean will see their elections culminate this weekend. Australians will go to the polls on Saturday, while Sunday marks the final day of India’s staggered voting season.
On the face of it, there is little to link the two elections:

Celebrities and politics are so closely intertwined in India that entire books have been written about “Bollywood Star Power in Indian Politics”. Whether we are talking about Bollywood superstars, Olympic medallists, or cricketing heroes, there are numerous examples of celebrities using their

At the end of a visit to India in the middle of a long and heated election campaign, the conversation with some young thinktank staff captured the country’s appetite for its democracy.
After mentioning I had been making comparisons with the parallel Indonesian election, they suddenly

As the mammoth task of elections in India continue up to a 19 May deadline, the nation’s election commission is seeking a full turnout of the population – including the often marginalised LGBTQI community. For the first time, transgender people have been anointed ambassadors

India’s election campaigning is in full swing and everything about the Indian general election is gigantic. This time, about 900 million people above the age of 18 will be eligible to cast their ballots spread over seven phases at a million polling stations, culminating on 19 May. The country’s

In an odd quirk of timing, this year Australia and India’s elections will run in parallel. On 11 April, Scott Morrison made the trip to Canberra’s Government House and the official campaign finally began.
On the same day, Indian voters began to go to the polls in the first of seven phases of

The largest ever Australian naval fleet arrived in India this week to conduct the biennial AUSINDEX naval exercises with the Indian Navy. The size and shape of this year’s exercise is a major step forward in defence cooperation between the two countries, even if significant political caution

In 2014, the average Indian voter was restless for change. Regular revelations about corruption scandals, frustrating policy paralysis, incessant price hikes and widespread unemployment all coalesced in a virtually stalled economy. In polls that year, the Indian electorate delivered the Bharatiya

Last month, scientists of India’s Defence Research and Development Organisation carried out an anti-satellite missile test, as a part of the mission codenamed Shakti (Power), and successfully destroyed one of the two satellites put into the low-earth orbit by the Indian Space Research Organisation

A biopic film about Prime Minister Narendra Modi is set to release on 5 April, just days before India starts voting for the general elections on 11 April. The proximity of the film’s release date to the upcoming Lok Sabha elections, coupled with the fact that the trailer was launched by

From the days of former Australian prime minister Robert Menzies, Australia has desired strong ties with India. “We must learn to think together and to act together,” Menzies declared in 1950 during a state visit to the then newly independent nation.
Australia’s economic exposure – and

Come 11 April, the first of the nearly 850 million eligible voters will begin to cast their votes in the world’s largest democratic exercise. India’s 17th Lok Sabha (lower house) elections will be held in seven phases between 11 April and 19 May, with counting to be held on 23 May.
For one man

Last month, Financial Times columnist Edward Luce asked, what would it take for India to get America’s attention? His question was rather aptly answered a couple of weeks later with a spot of brinkmanship in Kashmir (Pulwama terrorist attack: Modi under pressure), meaning India hit the

South Asia is integral to China’s Belt and Road vision. As an intersection point between the proposed “Silk Road Economic Belt” and the “21st Century Maritime Silk Road”, China sees South Asia as a “priority zone” for promoting its Belt and Road Initiative. It also helps that South

India’s air strikes this week targeting suspected terrorist hideouts in Pakistan and subsequent air battles comes at a time of growing concerns about sharply declining strength of India’s fighter squadrons. The number of aircraft presently stands at 31, against the authorised level of 42.
The

On Tuesday, India launched air strikes targeting what it claimed was the biggest training camp of the militant group, Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) near the town of Balakot in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan. The strikes were said to be aimed at preventing an imminent attack on India and

The strike by the Indian Air Force on Tuesday against targets in Pakistan is the latest step in a delicate shadow dance between India and Pakistan.
This began after a suicide bombing of an Indian military convoy at Pulwama in Indian Kashmir on 14 February, which killed more than 40 Indian

The Pulwama attack was clearly calibrated to pile pressure on Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in the run-up to the general election to be held in April and May 2019. The location and the target – paramilitary police deployed in Kashmir as part of an on-going effort to quell unrest that has

A suicide attack on the Indian forces in Pulwama, Kashmir that killed more than 40 security officials has set India and Pakistan – two nuclear powers ­– on a warpath. India has blamed Pakistan for sponsoring the attack, while Pakistan has denied any involvement, blaming India for its human

That India’s 14th prime minister is a gifted storyteller is well-known. An author of several children’s storybooks, Narendra Modi has in the past few years not only trumpeted the narrative of a poor tea-seller making his way to the highest office in the land but has also controlled every

The attack on a convoy of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) on 14 February is one of the most serious single strikes against security forces in the troubled region of Kashmir. Travelling from Jammu to Srinagar in the South Kashmir Pulwama district, a vehicle laden with 350 kilograms of

With its mammoth general elections due in April or May, Indian politics is entering full-bodied election mode. India’s 900 million voters are set to decide whether to return Prime Minister Narendra Modi to office, or not, in elections that some are describing as the most important since

Among the many questions raised by the massive modernisation and expansion of China’s Navy in the last few years is its future role in the Indian Ocean. Will the Indian Ocean become a Chinese lake?
China has gone from essentially zero presence in the Indian Ocean around a decade ago to a fairly

Over the past two years, police in the Indian state Uttar Pradesh are alleged to have carried out 59 extrajudicial killings. The events have sparked an inquiry by a panel of four United Nations independent experts on human rights, which in a statement this month “expressed alarm” about the

It is January; a month that, in north India, once fell in the season of winter, but now is more synonymous with the depths of the region’s dreaded pollution season. This month, as in recent years, a brutal combination of diverse factors has continued to coalesce to produce dire air quality in its

Last month, the leader of Australia’s best known anti-immigration party, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation, argued that not all non-white migration was a problem. Indians, Hanson said, were good migrants to Australia because they work hard and assimilate.
Hanson is not the first far-right, anti-

The Indian city Ayodhya recently once again turned into a saffron fortress.
The BJP seems set to fight the 2019 elections by rallying its factions and allies to assert the Hindutva agenda and further politicising Hindu-Muslim relations.
More than 50,000 supporters of the Hindu Right,

Ties between India and Australia have always been a little constrained – and unsurprisingly so, as traditionally there has been little to connect the two countries. For its part, Australia has for decades sought to have a better relationship with India, one that extends beyond shared democracy,

The recent decision by the government of Pakistan and India to build a corridor from Indian Punjab to Kartarpur in Pakistan has raised hopes for the revival of a dialogue between the countries.
The Kartarpur corridor will be built over a 4km stretch and will enable Sikh pilgrims from India to

Could there be a silver lining to India’s choking air pollution? A recent report from the World Health Organisation showed India with 9 of the 10 worst cities in the world for atmospheric pollution. Even more breathtaking was the fact that New Delhi, most often in the news for its abysmal air

You don’t hear much about India’s Andaman and Nicobar Islands aside from tourism or tribes. The islands, which make up one of India’s seven union territories, are a remote archipelago in the Bay of Bengal, about halfway between Thailand and India. They have traditionally been highly protected